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Cancer Research Patent
Manoa Assistant Professor Gordon Okimoto was granted a patent for an innovative computational method for identifying genes involved in cancer. The method, called Microarray ANalysis of InteNsities and RatIos or MANINI, has been used in a number of studies at the Cancer Research Center of Hawai’i to compare the activation of every known gene in normal and cancerous tissue samples, and to identify the genes that are different in cancer. The MANINI algorithm must still undergo testing to validate its effectiveness in the patient setting but appears to have a promising future in the management of cancer patient care.
“Based on studies using real human tumors, the MANINI algorithm has demonstrated tremendous potential in identifying a relatively small number of genes out of tens of thousands that are able to predict the recurrence and level of aggressiveness of specific cancers,” says Okimoto. “This information will aid physicians plan more precise treatments tailored to individual patients, without subjecting them to unnecessary surgical trauma, radiation, or administration of excessive chemotherapeutic or biological agents.”
The MANINI method is unconventional as it focuses on genes with weak and erratic signals for activation that are often ignored by standard statistical methods. Okimoto has shown in a number of studies that such genes, when viewed as a group, are often strongly associated with cancer. On the other hand, genes with stronger and more consistent signals are often missing from the data, or are biologically uninteresting as a group. For many studies, Okimoto believes that MANINI will complement rather than replace standard methods for identifying genes that are useful for diagnosis and prediction of the likelihood of recurrence or of how well a patient’s cancer will respond to treatment.